izigame.me

Sprawl has nothing to offer outside of what you see in the trailer. If you’re okay with 5 hours of the same gameplay you see in that 1-minute trailer with no additional depth or twists, Sprawl may be for you.
You play Seven, a super soldier with wall-jumping and bullet-time powers fleeing a cyberpunk dystopia. Equipped with a pair of Bladerunner revolvers and a Super Shotgun, you’ll complete one-note platforming sections until you’re locked in an arena and forced to headshot Half Life Combine guys in bullet time. Well yes, there are more than 2 weapons… but you won’t use them most of the time.
Sprawl has one of the least fun, least engaging, and least interesting weapon sets I can remember in a video game. I realize that sounds like hyperbole but hear me out: The shotgun spread is too tight, meaning it’s only useful for getting crits on heavys. The SMGs can’t score crits and are used for a single fast-moving enemy that doesn’t have a critical hit spot. The grenade launcher is ineffective against armored enemies but also can’t crit so using it on unarmored enemies deprives you of loot drops you’d get for killing them with a headshot; also there typically aren’t enough enemies in groups to justify using it for crowd control.
The chaingun may be the least satisfying minigun I’ve seen in a video game: it slows you down, feels awful, is incompatible with bullet time, low damage, can’t score crits (and therefore can’t get loot drops), seemingly shoots slower than the basic enemy rifle, and prevents you from using movement tech. The railgun has a charge time making it mostly incompatible with bullet time and movement tech; plus neither the movement tech, encounter design, nor level design complement a slow, “long-range” weapon with no zoom. The endgame BFG rocket launcher is surprisingly weak, can't score crits, is incompatible with bullet time, and is actually an inaccurate rocket shotgun.
The core of the gunplay is movement tech, bullet time, and headshots. That half of the weapons are incompatible with that core gameplay is…disastrous and embarrassing. This combined with generally unsatisfying sound effects, a lack of visual weight, and even a lack of vibration options on the controller makes Sprawl’s armory the worst weapon set in my memory. Combine the lack of vibration with a lack of combat feedback including little indication when you’re injured and no indication when you’re near death and you have a shooter that doesn’t work at even the most basic level.
Every level feels like parkouring past a bunch of guys, gaining elevation, and occasionally getting locked in a room until you kill enough guys to keep parkouring. But it’s not even interesting parkouring… it’s just wall running. No bars, no vaulting, no climbing. It makes for an underwhelming and often finnicky experience where missing a jump by a tiny bit is frustrating because there aren’t even ledge grabs.
There are no additional powers, no new move sets, no upgrades. You can cleverly use a TF2 Force-A-Nature shotgun jump, but using it effectively just skips content. I skipped several entire sections by accident because I said “I can make that jump” only to find out going the other way would have just been fighting to a button that extends a bridge. There’s a slide… but this isn’t Bulletstorm. Sliding doesn’t do anything to enemies and neither arenas nor enemies are designed with sliding jukes in mind.
Every enemy you headshot refills each of your resources at once. This feedback system disincentivizes using weapons that can’t target weak points (smgs, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, chaingun). Even when faced with hordes you can just go into bullet time, shoot guys in the head and get more bullet time, health, and ammo especially so because SPRAWL has auto aim. It’s really boring.
Most early-game enemies die in 1 hit, which is why you only need the pistols and then you save the shotgun for the armored heavy guys. This only changes at the last third of the game when encounters deploy overwhelmingly super heavy sponges (several of which don’t have a weak point) who absorb more ammo than killing them generates (and that’s using the heavier weapons)… which doesn’t fix the problem because the game was balanced around killing fodder enemies to generate resources. It would be like if the last few levels of DOOM Eternal replaced all the imps and zombies with hell knights and pain elements.
When heavies and super heavies dominate the landscape, it feels we’ve given up on balancing encounter design. It makes it seem like they didn’t know how to balance the game past a certain point so they just biased toward the tougher enemies rather than looking at how the pieces they have (dysfunctional though they are) fit together. And the problem is that when level design does not incentivize killing enemies in the first place and then you spawn a ton of super heavies who consume more resources than killing them generates, you don’t have a movement **shooter** anymore, you just have some movement tech.
It’s a broken resource economy that just… doesn’t work. The proof is in the pudding: boss fights are the only time I ran out of ammo or slo-mo and it’s because there’s only one enemy. On top of that, the boss fights feel like they’re designed for a totally different game because all three of them consist of circle strafing a flying vehicle in a flat box… in a game whose only competent mechanics are wall-running and bullet time headshots. It’s embarrassing.
Fundamentally, Sprawl doesn’t understand what makes shooters fun and engaging. It has copied answers from its classmates without realizing that it only gets points if it shows its work.